Don't be afraid of what's inside
by whereJIJisalive
Summary: Dave's mother wanted to cure him - so she sent him to be cured.
1. Lightning

_A/N: My writing is still experimental, and this is very much an experiment. So tell me which parts are good, and which parts aren't so good, because I know there's both in this fic. Also, if you think of a better summary, don't hesitate to suggest it to me!_

* * *

The boom of thunder sent him into hiding.

The shock of lightning coursed through his body.

Dreams, feelings, memories were becoming jumbled in his mind.

He fought, and he screamed, but the thunder concealed his screams and the storm clouds cloaked his eyes. He was hidden, buried within himself, and they told him, and he knew, he was never going to find his way out.

00

When they told him he was going home he didn't feel relieved. He didn't feel scared. He didn't feel anything. He couldn't even really remember why he was there in the first place. But going home seemed like something he should want to do, so he thanked them, and waited for someone to come get him.

When his mother appeared in the doorway to his room he paused. He swallowed. Something deep inside him, an emotion or a memory, was trying to fight its way to the surface. She helped him into new clothes, jeans and a button down, as opposed to the white overalls he was wearing before. He hadn't liked the overalls at first, he remembered, but then he had. He didn't know what had changed.

On the way home his mother told him how proud she was of him. He was cured, she said. He wasn't broken anymore. To that he smiled, but he got that bad taste in his mouth once again as he felt a forgotten memory stir within him. It felt strange. Everything was numb, like it had been when he was in that bed, in the special room, when they had brought the lightning and thunder and it had consumed him. Maybe it never left him, he mused. There was still a storm inside him, still fog before his eyes.

Even though he had gaps in his memory(all for the best, his mom and his doctors assured him), he still remembered where they lived, and that was not where his mother was taking him.

"Aren't we going home?" he asked as she turned onto another unfamiliar road.

"Of course we are, honey," she answered and smiled at him. "Just you and me and our new house. Your father and I decided you need a change of scenery so you can stay healthy."

He swallowed down the bad taste in his mouth and let her drive him into Little Rock, Arkansas. He was sure it would be fine. It would all be fine.

00

He was back in school, a new school, and repeating his senior year because apparently he had missed half of it when he was busy getting cured, as his mother fondly referred to that blurry period of his life. He remembered that he used to be good at maths and science. He wasn't good at them anymore. He couldn't remember anything he had learnt. The fog that was still there made him lose track of the world sometimes, and he couldn't focus anymore.

His mom made him join the football team, and what energy he had he spent there. He even made a few friends there, but he was sure that he didn't really like any of them.

One day in school a silhouette broke through the fog in his eyes. It was a boy in the lunch queue. He was wearing dark skinny jeans and a fancy jacket that hugged his waist. He had short, light brown hair that was styled expertly on top of his head. Dave could feel his heart beat faster as his head started to throb, and never before had he felt a memory from _before _be so close to surfacing. The boy turned around, but his face was unfamiliar. It wasn't right. It wasn't... It wasn't _him_.

His headache got so bad that day that he had to go home. His mother took one look at him, gave him sleeping pills and sent him to bed. He woke up two days later and the fog was back, blurring his sight more than ever.

00

That fall he had to go back to the hospital that cured him, for a check-up, his mother said. The doctors asked him lots of questions, about memories and emotions and triggers, and he found himself holding the memory of the boy he had seen close to his heart. He didn't want them to take it away from him. The storm in him, the tremors in his hands and the headaches he had were beginning to lessen, and the doctors said that this wasn't good because it meant that he was forgetting what he had learned there. He wasn't supposed to see, but they gave his mother a bottle of pills and told her that they were going to help Dave stay cured. He found himself wondering for the first time, though he didn't ask, what illness they had cured him of.

They didn't make him wear the overalls.

00

The guys on the football team made him go to a party with them. There he met a girl. Her name was Sami. She had long, curly, light brown hair and she was shorter than he was. She wasn't really pretty, but Dave supposed he liked her well enough. The best thing about her was her eyes. They were blue and grey and reminded him of something. Something good. So he kissed her and went to more parties with her, and soon she was calling him her boyfriend.

00

The day before Valentine's Day he introduced Sami to his mother. He remembered the last time she had been proud of him, it was when she had picked him up from the doctors, but he couldn't remember the last time she had looked at him so warmly, with so much love.

He couldn't figure out why it made him feel so uneasy.

00

His mother still gave him a pill every night before bed, and they helped him sleep. They also made the fog thicker, but his mom said that that was good, so he didn't question it.

Sami knew that he wasn't quite healthy, that his sickness still lingered in the form of confusion and disconnection, but she loved him anyway. She said once that she prayed every night that he would get better.

Sami said she loved him. She said that a lot. She wanted him to spend the night in a hotel with her. He didn't want that, but he didn't say no.

Sami broke up with him when he couldn't have sex with her. It was not that he didn't try. It was that he couldn't.

00

Graduation was coming up, and through some miracle he had passed the necessary classes and would get his High School diploma. He asked his mother what he should do after graduation, and she said he should get a job. With his illness, he couldn't go to college anyway.

He wondered sometimes, why his dad didn't come to his graduation. Why he never called, and why he never visited. But Dave never asked. His mom always got very angry when he asked questions like that.

00

Things within him started to change. The storm still raged inside of him, the headaches still persisted, the fog still clouded his eyes, but a curiosity that didn't exist before slowly started to form in his mind. It all began when his mother was out one night, the first date she had gone on in forever, and he guessed that meant his suspicions were correct. His dad was out of the picture for good.

He put the tv on in the living room, simply because he could, and because he wasn't supposed to. Accidentally he stumbled onto a movie channel, where they were showing a movie called Brokeback Mountain. He watched it with shock, seeing two men fall in love with each other, and when they kissed, he was pulled out of the fog for a minute, a different but similar scene playing out in his mind's eye. The scene was of him, and another boy in the McKinley locker room. He furrowed his brow, trying to concentrate, trying to grab hold of the elusive memory, and when he did, he almost fell off the couch.

Bully. Kurt Hummel. Blue eyes. Kiss.


	2. Storm Clouds

_A/N: The end of my little two-shot. I might do a sequel in the future if the muse strikes. :)_

He didn't take his pills after that night. He pretended to, so his mom wouldn't know the difference, but he actually flushed them down the toilet. His blind trust in his mother was beginning to dissipate, and gradually, with every pill not swallowed, so was the fog he had been lost in for over a year.

00

He had managed to get a job in a petrol station, and he made sure that he was the one who got the pay checks every time and that he didn't show them to his mother. He kept a small amount of the money from her every month and his savings grew. He didn't know what he would do. Saving that money was probably not necessary. He could just search her room when she wasn't home and find her hidden stash of money – he knew she must have one – and be on his way. But that wasn't the issue. What would he do, when he ran away from her? Where would he go?

All of his memories weren't back, and the drugs he had been lost in hadn't lost their effect entirely, but he was now able to put together the pieces he had and form a coherent image.

He had bullied Kurt Hummel. Because he loved Kurt Hummel. His school had found out. He had tried to kill himself. His mother had found out. She put him in a facility where they tried to cure him of being gay. He realized now that the storm – the thunder and lightning – was in reality electric shock therapy. He had gone to the library after work one day and googled the side effects. It was the only explanation. Memory loss, headaches, confusion, learning difficulties. Add the drugs to that and he was staring at his symptoms. His mother hadn't cured him. She was the one who had made him sick.

00

There was one big hole in the story. Why hadn't his dad saved him? Why hadn't he found him and saved him from her? That question was the one that finally led him to search out his mother's money – 2000 dollars under the mattress – and on the 22nd of December take a bus to Lima.

00

When he arrived in Lima he took one of the town's three cabs to his old address, not knowing what he was expecting. He walked up to the house, which looked exactly like it always had done, and rang the doorbell with his heart in his throat.

A middle-aged woman he didn't know opened the door. "How can I help you?" she asked with a smile. Dave stuttered out his reply, saying that he was looking for Paul.

"Oh," the woman said with a disgruntled look on her face. "Poor thing. Don't you know? The Karofskys died in a car crash. It was more than a year ago now."

Dave was proud of himself for not fainting.

00

Before he left he had looked up Burt Hummel's address on the internet. Feeling a little bit sick, and more confused than ever, he walked all the way to Kurt's father's house. He hoped that, it being Christmas soon, Kurt would be there. When he got there, he stood a safe distance from the house just staring at it. He didn't know what he would say. What if Kurt wasn't the one who answered the door? What if they would call his mother and she would come take him back? It was an irrational fear, he knew that, but it was there nonetheless.

After standing there for ten minutes, he finally made his way, slowly, to the door. He rang the doorbell and waited. A middle aged man opened the door, Burt, his mind provided, and Dave's nervousness increased in intensity. Dave had bullied Kurt. Burt probably hated him. But the man just stared at him, his mouth gaping in what Dave guessed was surprise. Of course. Everybody probably thought he was dead.

"Um, Mr Hummel," he began without the slightest idea of how he would finish the sentence.

"David," the man said, and a smile formed on his face. "I'm sorry, oh my world. Dave, come in!"

David obeyed. He let Burt sit him down on a chair in the kitchen and sat quietly despite Burt's expectant look.

"You want to tell me what's going on, son?" Burt asked cautiously.

Dave swallowed. He had never talked about it before. Never put it all in words. He took a deep breath, and began in a shaky voice.

00

He told Burt about the clinic and the shock therapy(though not in detail), about the memory loss and the confusion(amongst unshed tears), and about the drugs that had rendered him helpless. He tried to tell him what he needed to tell him so that it would make sense, but he was not well-versed in manipulating his words anymore, and almost everything came tumbling out before he could stop it.

Finally he came to the point of when he had _woken up, _so to speak. "So when she was out of the house one evening – and she was almost never out – I put the tv on. It sounds like such a small thing, I know, but it was huge to me because she was controlling everything I did and everything I knew," Dave could feel his throat closing up, and he knew that if he looked at Burt's friendly, supporting eyes he would start to cry. When he thought back to how weak he had been, how weak he still was, shame also burned in his eyes.

"And believe it or not, but Brokeback Mountain was on tv. It, uh, triggered a memory."

Burt looked expectantly at him, but under no circumstances was he going to tell him about that particular memory.

"After that I didn't take her pills anymore, though I pretended to." Dave continued and finished his pathetic story by relaying his last few months with his mother, and that when he finally got up the courage to get away from her and go to his old house in Lima, the woman there had told him that they thought his family had died in a car crash.

He might have ended up crying a few times during his story, but what did it matter? He was already broken.

00

Burt did his best to comfort him. Dave didn't let himself be touched, but he could tell that Burt was trying to help. He wondered for a moment, how different his life would have been if he had grown up with Burt instead of his actual mother and father. He thought about how self-secure Kurt had always been, and he realized that that wasn't due to glitter and magic, not even to how amazing Kurt was as a person, but due to Burt. He sighed and wiped his tears away with his sleeve, sitting back in his chair.

"Does _everyone_ believe that I'm dead?" he asked. "Why?"

"It was on the news one day that you and your parents had died in a car accident. I'm sorry, son, from what you've told me I can only say that your mother orchestrated the whole thing. I can't tell you how, though. Did you still use your full name while you were in Little Rock?"

"Yeah," Dave answered, though he realized how ridiculous that sounded. They surely would have found him if he had used his full name? He drew his eyebrows together as he ransacked his brain for any hidden information on this. "Wait." What an idiot he had been. What a stupid, pathetic, malleable idiot.

"How is my last name spelled?"

00

They were still sitting there ten minutes later, and Burt had just told him that he could stay in their guest bedroom for as long as he'd like, for which Dave was grateful. He just needed some time to figure things out.

"The prodigal son returns!" They could hear from the entrance, and Dave froze. Kurt. Kurt was home. He had been so busy talking to Burt and trying to sort everything out in his head that he'd nearly forgotten about Kurt.

The silence from behind him was suddenly incredibly tense, and he could hear Kurt walking through the dining room to the kitchen, from where the small kitchen table where they sat was clearly visible.

"Dave?" Kurt's voice sounded small, almost afraid, and damn. The last thing Dave wanted to hear was Kurt afraid of him again. He stood up and turned around, a little scared himself.

"Oh my god." As soon as Kurt saw his face he dropped everything he was holding and started running. He crashed into Dave and held on to him for dear life. There was a moment of tense silence, when the only sound was Kurt's quiet sniffles against his shoulder.

"Kurt, maybe you should-" Burt began, but silenced abruptly as he saw Dave's arms finally come to rest against Kurt's back.

Tentatively. Carefully.

He was trying to suppress the feeling of foreboding, the feeling that he was doing something wrong. After a few minutes Kurt finally pulled back, revealing a tear-stained face much like Dave's own. He ran his hands down Dave's arms and squeezed his hands, which caused Dave to flinch. He was taken back to that soundproof room where he had been laying on that bed, electrodes covering parts of his body, electrodes in the palms of his hands and clenching those hands into the sheets with pain while a voice over the speakers repeated an anti-gay hate speech over and over again.

He walked backwards in what he knew was irrational fear until his back hit the wall, and looked desperately at Burt. He was shaking as he told him he couldn't do this. What _this_ was he wasn't entirely sure, but Kurt's presence just overwhelmed him, and this he hoped to silently communicate to Burt.

"Dave, if you come with me I'll show you to the guest room," he said, voice soft and eyes caring, and led him away from Kurt.

00

As it turned out, Kurt was so much a reminder of the clinic and everything they had done to him there that it was hard for Dave to be around him. He spent his first two days at the Hummels' holed up in his temporary room, leaving all the explaining to Burt.

It was now Christmas Eve, and Dave knew he needed to talk to Kurt before Carole and Finn came back from her parents. He made his way to Kurt's room and knocked.

"Hang on a second!" Kurt shouted from the other side of the door. A little while later, he opened it, and looked surprised to find Dave standing there. "Hey, come in!" he smiled.

Dave entered, moving slowly and purposely. He crossed his arms over his chest, as a way of putting physical as well as psychological distance between the two of them. It might have looked defensive. It might have been the only defense he had left. "I just wanted to apologize for being so weird around you. I don't know how much Burt has told you, but it's difficult, and it reminds me-" he took a deep breath, prepared to continue when Kurt stopped him. His face expressed so much pity that Dave couldn't look at it.

"Dad told me about the... where they put you, and I assure you, you have_ nothing _to apologize for. I just can't believe you're even alive. I went to your funeral, you know, and god it must be weird to hear that. But I did, and when I thought I was never going to see you again, I was heartbroken."

Dave looked up. He swallowed. "I didn't think you cared," he admitted. "Since nobody ever came for me, I didn't really think anybody cared." his voice was almost emotionless as he was thinking back to living in Little Rock with his mom. It was fitting, since his time there _had_ been emotionless.

"David, ever since that tearful apology in the hallways, maybe even before that, I've cared about you. So much." Kurt looked at him, as if searching for something, before he tentatively moved forward. He was close enough that Dave understood what he wanted, even before he asked.

"Is it okay if I give you a hug?"

Dave looked down into Kurt's eyes, eyes the color of a storm cloud, and nodded. There was a different kind of lightning coursing through his body as they hugged, a different kind of cloud before his eyes.

And he didn't know how to handle it, how to get rid of the flashbacks or the pain they brought, but he did know that this was a step in the right direction. Kurt wanted to help him, and Dave had a feeling that he was the only one who could.


End file.
